


a forger gives you the goods

by kormantic



Category: Dublin Murder Squad Series - Tana French, Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Dreamsharing, F/M, Forging (Inception), Frank Mackey's Home for Wayward Detectives, Spies & Secret Agents, Training up the new lot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 13:10:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13054668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kormantic/pseuds/kormantic
Summary: “Your dream partner grows in the back of your mind, secret, like your dream girl. Mine grew up with violin lessons, floor-to-high-ceiling books, red setters, a confidence he took for granted and a dry sense of humor no one but me would get. Mine was everything that wasn’t Conway, and I would’ve bet hers was everything that wasn’t me. But the click was there. Maybe, just for a few days, we could be good enough for each other." – Stephen Moran, The Secret Place





	a forger gives you the goods

**Author's Note:**

  * For [arbitrarily](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/gifts).



Cassie Maddox smoked her way through half a pack in just the time I sat there waiting on Frank, and never said a word.

Sam O’Neill, stocky and patient, his fair hair getting a bit shaggy, had given me a cordial nod when I’d come in, pausing from the work of cleaning his gun, with a long swab and a clip light for fine detail work. When he was done, he asked me if I’d like a coffee, and then how I took it, before caressing the back of Cassie’s neck and pressing a kiss to her temple on his way out.

The room itself was in a half-built out renovation in a newer but anonymous office building; the rest of the floor was mostly yawning space and flecks of drywall, but here there were proper, sound-dousing walls--walls that were stacked with pressboard crates of lager.

Frank showed up with Conway just as Sam came back with a coffee for all of us, Conway included, and several more besides. Conway had her brows cramped down and looked right nipped at herself, but Frank looked like the cat that ate the cream with a canary downed in it. He was clean shaven and respectable in a suit - a sharp one, too, and he was carrying a briefcase, sleek with secrets and aluminum lustre. His blue eyes were fair twinkling in his head, and the room’s weird spotlights shone on the blue-black gloss of Conway’s smooth, swept-back hair.

How do you keep a secret when you’ve so many in on it?

And this was a secret, never mind that Frank hadn’t said more than it being a stint at undercover for a sad lad scoured from the Murder Squad, ah, too soon.

“Well hello, young Stephen. Welcome to the Garage.”

“It’s not,” Cassie said, and a wisp of smoke wound from her mouth as she stubbed out her latest cigarette. “It’s actually the Apocalypse Suite Two Point Oh. One Point Oh is a sub-let he keeps out in Grafton Street. It doesn’t look much like this, but he does line the walls with the very same beer.”  She stood up and rumbled in the pocket of a narrow, dark jacket she’d slung over the back of her chair.

She pressed a button and said, “If you’re coming, we’re counting heads.” Then she stowed the cell again and crossed in front of the table, with its haphazard stack of manila folders topped with an over-full and arse-balanced ashtray that was making me long to re-settle it.

Rolling up the sleeves of her blouse past the crease of her elbows, she tucked her curls behind her ears and reached over me to grab a coffee from the tray Sam had held out on offer. She had a pink Hello Kitty plaster in the crook of her arm, and I could see the recessed lighting glint off her wedding rings as she took the one with my name on it too, and handed it to me.

There was a discreet knock at the door, and three more fellas walked in: Rob Ryan tall and put together, shiny hair and keen look, with something sullen about his mouth, Richie Curran hunching up behind him with a fresh crew cut, little and spindly as a kid in a green striped tracksuit and hoodie for the Pike Rovers, and last, Mick Kennedy, striding in with a waistcoat and all, a pocket square that matched his tie. Frank had called him Scorcher, when we were at Faithful Place, but no one else did, not before or after Kennedy tendered his resignation - excepting maybe Kennedy himself.

The conference room was big enough not to feel gasped for space, but there was a kind of psychic crowding here that pressed on my brain.

“And all my lambs return to the flock,” Frank said genially. Everyone but Sam gave Frank a shitty look, letting him know their feelings on that. Cassie toasted Frank and then took a single sip of her coffee before setting it down to lean her hips against the table and fidget with her lighter.

“Have a seat, all of yous. I have a proposition for you, new and old. Best case, we’re all in, worst case you’ll stay back with Cassie after we fit this lot with training wheels.” He nodded to me and Conway.

“But I want in, too,” Cassie said sharply, and she was so tiny and her chin was so high, she looked for all the world like a kid sister kicking up a fuss that Frankie gets a later curfew.

“I know you do, and you’ll be background, which is vital to the run.”

“Why are you cutting me out?” And this time it wasn’t petulant, but dark and defiant, like she was an edge away from punching him in the throat.

For a moment, Frank looked weary, even regretful, and he intoned, “You know why.”

Cassie turned on her heel and went back to her seat, taking it gently as a breath, but with her eyes all but burning away into Frank’s very skull.

“Now, it’s time for show and tell. Richie, do the honors will you.”

Richie was biddable and dialed in the combination and popped the briefcase lid.

Inside was a length of coiled rubber tubing and some molded plastic around some metal cylinders arranged in a hub.

Holy fuck, I’ve fallen in with terrorists, I thought blankly.

Conway clearly felt the same, as she said, “I’m not after gassing The Tube with you fuckos, or whatever your shite plan is, so--”

“Compose yourself, Ms. Conway. It’s not a bomb,” Frank said placidly.

“It’s not,” Richie chimed in, and I believed him.

“This lovely bit of tech is known in the biz as a PASIV.” Frank had regained his look of being well-pleased, even threw in a bit of jazz hands to showcase the thing.

“That’s Portable Automated Somnacin IntraVenous Device,” Kennedy said. “For those new to the class.” He didn’t look at me, and had been careful not to, but he did give Conway a tip of the chin.

“And what’s Somnacin, then? Is this some kind of drug-running pyramid scheme, yeah?”

With Conway in the room, I’d not need to part my lips for a question, but I was happy to let her bash her way through, so I could take a second look and see what she might have turned up while she had all eyes on her.

“Okay,” Cassie said, slapping her hands on the table to get our attention. “Let’s shortcut the grandstanding. It _is_ a drug, it _is_ illegal, and it’s used in tandem with this machine.”

“What’s it do? Knock out unsuspecting pensioners and rob their organs?”

“It lets you share dreams.” She took a long drag of her latest cigarette and then exhaled slowly, gesturing with it so it looked like she was introducing us to a spirit.

“You’re all nutters,” Conway said faintly.

“Nope,” Frank said with a vulpine smile. “We’re all sane, every one of us. We’re just… pragmatic. If you can approach someone in a dream, you can find and press and hold all their buttons, until they just pop open and let you have all the candy. This is an elegant little shortcut for what they call _spying_ these days, my girl. Don’t you want to do your part for your sovereign nation? Because I’ve an ugly poxy bin of a job for us, and if it doesn’t go well, the world, the real one, for good and all, may just go tits up.” His eyes sparkled, and if he was telling the truth, he didn’t care about it, not when it came to the job.

“Who made this thing? How did you even find out about it? Who on God’s green is trusting _you_ with end of the world scenarios?”

Valid questions, but for the last one. If ever I was up to my neck in something that needed to be come at crossways by someone you could count on to get things done no matter what, Frank Mackey would be my first call.

I was surprised to see Kennedy clear his throat with intent, and deliberately straighten his designer tie.

“Frank gives every lost hope an even chance, in his crooked Liberties way. We need him, like it or not.”

Conway met my eye and we just stared at one another for a long, endless breath before I tipped my head first at Kennedy and then at Frank. And then I nodded.

She straightened her shoulders and relaxed her hands before turning to Frank.

“We’re in then. What’s the quick and dirty?”

 

***

Cassie and Rob. Sounds like a teen romance, the kind of names written in bubble letters on a yearbook cover, right smack dab in the middle of a cartoon heart. A year ago I’d have called him a ponce and her a priss, but I know them now. He’s still a ponce, but he’s got a focus I hadn’t kenned, and she’s gentle and never mean, all while being cool and steady as you like. She could chatter you right into doing anything, and you’d think it was your idea.

These days she’s a model architect, with a specialty in blind alleys and secret passageways. But Frank says she was an extractor first.

“The best one ever I’ve seen. We’ll not see another Cassie any time soon.”

It was high praise, especially since Mackey’s not exactly unknown in the world of extraction – if you ask anyone with any opinion of the world of dream ops, of Frank Mackey’s Neverland, they would be the first and second shining stars in the dark sky of it, because they weren’t just extractors but forgers, too.

Mackey calls this place the Garage, but Moran says it should be The Chop Shop: “We’re stolen away and stripped for parts, yeah? Re-tuned for dark purpose.” He’s come over shocking cynical since we crossed into black ops. And that’s what Mackey calls it, but I don’t truly believe we’re under the aegis of any government, now. Just blocking assassins and would-be thieves of the odd state secret. I don’t doubt he has someone in the parliament giving him targets, but that’s not at all the same as being sanctioned. And who knows where the money comes from. Kennedy, maybe. I don’t doubt he has spreadsheets, helpfully encrypted by little Richie Curran, our local scout and resident chemist.

Richie’s got the real shit job – his is the most dangerous, since he’s the one best suited for turning over rocks in the Liberties and wherever you like to find your skangers. He can be shot in real time, and bleed out for good and all. Cassie and Rob cover all our white-collar leads and run the background, since they retired from dream time.

Cassie was out of the game before I started here. Rob was here before her, I’m told, but Sam O’Neill came with her and still works as a point man. He’s steady and reliable, not easy to spook, and doesn’t have a sniff of overthinking anything. He lives in the moment and one moment ahead to plan for danger, and then to please his missus. I’ve never seen the like. It’s almost as if he’s a figment of her imagination, one she frequently seems to forget is here on the outside, alive and breathing in real time, like her. Real time and dream time, you can get it mixed if you don’t keep sharp, and it’s worse if you have imagination.

That’s why Frank says he likes me. “Not a speck of imagination in you, my girl. Just a good eye and dab hand for physical evidence. Just what I like to see.”

It’s Cassie’s imagination that jammed her up. Mackey stayed up drinking with Moran and me one night, and he admitted what had gone wrong—with her and with Rob, too.

The first job we ever took was Rob’s last; he’d been the architect for two stages, and the second one, which was after being a supermarket, kept turning to a weird old stand of twisted trees. The fluorescent lighting would flicker into dapples and the cold chill of AC would turn into the moss damp of rotting wood, leaves crunching under your feet on the Linoleum.

It didn’t hurt the job at all – in a dream, it’s nothing to the dreamer if they’re eating a candy floss at the fair and then walking onto the deck of the ferry. That’s just how dreams are. But Frank was angry like I’d never seen him, and I do recall I’d once accused his sixteen-year-old daughter of murder.

Rob stayed on the outside after that, and one night a few weeks later, he and Cassie had a screeching row that ended with them clinging together in the hallway and weeping like lost children. Sam collected them and drove them home and they’ve all seemed easier since.

Frank had recruited me and Moran together, after what Moran calls “the unpleasantness” and I call a feckin’ _frame up_. But no matter how we got here, we’re still partners, and we will stay on and leave that way, too. That I know like I know my mother’s name.

Moran was recruited for a forger, but he turned out to be shite at it. I know Frank was surprised that I took to it, but Cassie had looked at me hard, and maybe she could tell I had a knack for making myself what I have to be -  and that she and Frank knew I’d worked undercover added a shine to me. Moran and Kennedy hand off point and take turns backing Frank for extractions, and neither is a slouch at it, if Moran leans on Good Cop and Kennedy on Legal Intimidation.

“Why doesn’t she work dream time anymore,” I asked Frank, just as he set his empty bottle down. “She taught me a lot of techniques I’d never have come up with on my own. Meditations, all that bollix, but it works. Why doesn’t it work for her?”

“She has a shade,” he said shortly.

“A shade,” Moran muttered, sounding like he’d been told she was a stage 4 cancer patient.

“And what’s that?”

“It’s a ghost. Follows you around. Throws a spanner in the jet engine. Murders you in the dream, if it can.”

“Jaysus. It’s not...” I didn’t want to ask if it was an _actual_ ghost. After St. Kilda’s and Holly Mackey and her mates, it seemed more than possible. After all, I spent my sleeping hours working undercover jobs wearing a stranger’s face in a shared dream. Why not that, too? Besides, Mackey wasn’t the only one with an empty bottle on the table, so my question got farther than it might have otherwise.

He gave me a slow, curling grin, one eyebrow propped and blue eyes glinting. “Is she well and truly haunted, d’ya mean? Well. Yes and no. You heard about that fuckup during Operation Mirror, back when we were a people who saw the sun?”

Moran and I both gave him a nod. Cassie Maddox undercover after her doppelganger, her spit, her very feckin’ twin, was stabbed to death. What a cool hand to slide into a dead woman’s cold glove and pretend to be alive to all her people, including the one who’d killed her in the first place. That took neck. Yeah, we knew about Operation Mirror.

“Was it young Daniel who—“ Moran started.

“Lexie,” I shot out, and I knew I was right. “She sees Lexie in dream time.”

“She does.” Frank nodded, slow and weary. “And it screws the job, and so she’s retired.”

*

Moran won’t say it, but he doesn’t miss Murder. He thinks he should, but deep down, he’s like me: he’d rather have real work than recognition, and what we do can’t be done by anyone else.

When we were still new enough not to know better, when we thought we could get somewhere together, before we got thrown to the dogs in IA like so many plate scrapings, he admitted that he’d had a sort of pretty, idealized daydream of what it would be to have a partner, and to be the kind who makes a solid job of life: a smart detective, a pretty wife, four walls and a picket fence.

By then I knew him enough to know that he was attracted to me, but that it was mostly abstract – that it was more he _thought_ he should be than he actually was. Whatever nonsense is going on with Rob and Cassie, or Cassie and Rob and Sam together, sex has more than a little to do with it. Before we came to the Garage, though, sex wasn’t a part of us, and it isn’t a problem. Not now. Now, it’s a blink, a shimmer. Like seeing someone always turn a corner just ahead of you. If you walked a step faster, you could catch them, ask them why they seem familiar.

I’m not sure which of us will take a brisk run at the other, or if it will happen at all. It doesn’t need to, and we’ve already had it out. How it happened, I’m not exactly proud of, but maybe, like Rob and Cassie’s crying jag, it cleared the air.

Do I blame Moran for losing Murder? I did, at the start of this. Now I know it wasn’t him at all, that he took a fall, the same as me. But I told you, real time and dream time can get bollixed, and I was black-eyed with old cold anger, years’ worth, when we came here. Let’s say I was after lashing out, and since he was closest to me, he was the easiest target. On top of it all, it’s a rush, dream time. I have hand to god superpowers on the other side. The stuff spotty teen boys sweat and swoon over in comic books. I can build castles with my _mind_ , and I can look like Beyoncé in a diamond coronet while I do it. I have done, in fact. It was Cassie’s idea, sure enough, and she was tipsy and flushed and laughing when she suggested it, but if you want to know what true power feels like, I say give _that_ a try.

So while I was training, learning Cassie’s tricks of the trade, Frank took Moran aside for point work and labyrinths. Frank had had to work hard to catch us both, and I’d made him strain for it just on principle, but Moran is susceptible to a certain swagger, and Mackey has animal charm besides and he’s not shy of using it. A week or two in, just as I was getting the basics of taking on other looks, Sam and Frank and Mick Kennedy were building for a little bank twerp they wanted to squeak on a few shell corporations funneling cash out of people’s pensions. Moran and I had been left to ourselves to practice on the first level, with nine hours on the clock.  In hour seven or so, Moran conjured us a bottle of very fine whiskey, and the two of us drank more than a little.

I don’t drink much, over all. It makes it hard to keep my mouth shut. It _whets my sharp tongue_ , my mother would say. But I was drinking that night, and I was feeling mean.

“So. Looks like you’re up for an office romance.”

“What are you on about?” He looked genuinely baffled, too.

“You and Mackey. Sneaking off to corners, sleeping hand in hand, just about. Didn’t think rough trade was your style. I’d have said our Rob, or Scorcher even so, would suit you better.”

“He’s married,” Moran said. And he hadn’t meant to. Whether the liquor was imaginary or not, sober, he’d have made a joke of it, said nah, but little Richie Curran has nice bones, could clean up real pretty, become a young one his mother’d be proud to meet. _He’s married_ , he said. Nothing like, _He’s a man._

“So if he wasn’t married, you’d be at your honeymoon at St. Bart’s?”

Rare gleam of real anger in his eyes, he said, soft and low, “And what if I was?”

Thinking of Cassie’s breathing techniques, and the cold leather/aftershave/dry tobacco spice of Mackey, I closed my eyes and when I opened them again, they were Frank Mackey’s silver-blue. Good shoulders, little curve of muscle at the biceps. Hair a short, soft sheeny tumble, mostly dark but going _distinguished_ at just one temple. I curled Frank’s best _let’s-have-a-lark_ smile at him, and he coughed the last wisp of his whiskey.

“Antoinette, what are you after?” And his voice was raspy with spirits, and he looked angry again, but not--not disgusted.

That was something I could work with. I stood up and leaned forward to spread my hands on the table and give him the classic Mackey stare-down.

He stood up, too, knocking over his chair, staring back, anger fading into confusion.

I strolled around the table, hands in pockets, ranging nearer.

Stephen Moran is ambitious, and he waits for his breaks and he takes his chances with both hands. He’s more like me than he knows, I think. But he’s also had it easy, even so. A man, a white man, in a white man’s world. Sure, most of this team has come up from nothing, but he still had a running start compared to me. And sometimes, when he takes something for granted that I would have had to bare-knuckle brawl for as a woman in Dublin with a brown skin, I could snap his neck.

But most days, I appreciate him. Moran calls it The Click, the partnership we have. And we do have it, that simpatico no-words-needed-in-the-moment glow that shows up on the job and makes it easy. If I were the explaining type, I do think that he’d truly understand why there are days I could sink my teeth in him; he certainly knows _when_ they are, and is a marvel of de-escalation nine times of ten.

He lifted his hands, empty, palms out.

“Not like this,” he said.

“Want a world of day-time consequence, then?” I sneered.

“I want _you_. You, with your own face. You.”

I blinked Mackey away and stared at Stephen, gobsmacked and red-eared with shame at my own surprise, and a sudden, dizzying rush of real desire. The sizzle-in-your-fingertips kind that twangs in your cunt and stiffens your nipples. I could thread my hand in his hair and he’d kneel. Slow strip of my clothes, his tongue in me, melting hot. He could magic a bed into the room and he could eat me for an hour and I could ride him ‘til he broke.

We might have done, too, but for the others showing up early, Mackey frustrated and calling the day a bad job.

*

Cassie and Rob sound like a couple made to age out of themselves, to dissolve in a tearful rage at a prom court party, a starter kit. Your sex-hazed lust mistaken for love basic first kiss bollicking. Written on a page in a neat block-hand, though, _Antionette Conway, Stephen Moran_. Could be built to last.

END

 

[the share](http://archiveofourown.org/works/13098729)

**Author's Note:**

> Your prompts were rad as hell. Have a lovely yuletide! May you get something under the tree you didn't even know you'd wanted!


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